The Thing You Love Most
by Black-throatedBlue
Summary: The Evil Queen captures an outlaw with a lion tattoo. She kills him for it. (Outlaw Queen, major character death.)


A/N: Regina's definitely The Evil Queen in this story, just to warn you, so, mediaeval torture practises ahoy (hopefully not too graphic).

* * *

><p>"We've captured the outlaw, Robin Hood," Claude says.<p>

The Evil Queen smiles, "And his rabble?"

"Not yet, your majesty."

The smile washes away. "Well, find them," she says, "You have a prisoner: make use of him."

Claude bows.

* * *

><p>A promising lead on Snow White falls through.<p>

The Evil Queen is in a foul, distracted mood, tapping long nails on the lacquer of her table.

"What of the outlaw?"

"Your majesty?"

"Have you _found_ his _rabble_?"

"Not yet, your majesty, he leads us astray -"

"_Incompetent_ -!" The Queen stops herself abruptly and her knights tense still further. "You've been taking him around the forest?"

"Y-yes, your majesty."

She snarls and tosses the speaker (Guillaume?) out the window, everything thrashing black-clad limbs and a desperate yell, a distant doughy thwack and silence all too quick.

The remaining knights try not to flinch.

"_Torture_ him, fools, if he will not use his tongue he will lose it."

"Your majesty," they bow.

* * *

><p>Before the last month Robin Hood's experience of unintentional captivity was a night badly beaten in the sheriff's jail before rescue came early with the dawn. Now he has gone straight from the Dark One's dungeons to the Evil Queen's, with scarcely time to save Marian (she will live!) inbetween.<p>

As his ears ring and vision swims with an idle cuff from an armoured fist to the head, as he strains at the leather straps and Black Knights fasten thumbscrews onto hands clever with theft and with bow, he thinks on flaying and with dark humour considers himself lucky that at least the Evil Queen does not do all her evil herself. Without magic the Black Knights can only harm him such a way once.

When his fingers crush he screams with pain and horror.

The flaying was not permanent.

* * *

><p>"News from the dungeons, your majesty," the Mirror says, oily as always.<p>

"Well?"

"Robin Hood will never use a bow again," he smiles.

"And information?"

The Mirror looks embarrassed. "Nothing useful as yet."

* * *

><p>Robin does his best to stay silent but every instinct gets the better of him as they question him. He cries when they release his crushed fingers, shies away when they make to stamp on them and cries out again when they beat him and succeed. He thinks of his Merry Men and knows they will have seen him lead the Black Knights through the forest on a futile dance, but thinks of Marian and his unborn child and knows every minute will help them.<p>

His torturer, Antoine, is a surprisingly eloquent speaker, and need only describe his plans for Robin's feet and lightly demonstrate on a youth strapped in a warming Iron Chair before Robin fears much worse than the fate of his hands. Antoine holds the cherry-red metal close enough to singe and gives him his options.

Antoine presses down; Robin speaks.

* * *

><p>"We searched the Major Oak area in Sherwood as he suggested but Robin Hood's men had already left."<p>

"They escaped you."

"Yes, your majesty."

"You didn't _bother_ searching the Major Oak area before?"

"We found him nowhere near there, there was no reason to suppose -"

The Evil Queen snarls and there is silence.

Then she turns, "where was he captured?"

The first speaker hesitates, rocking back a little.

Another knight steps forward. "The Great Western Road, your majesty, near the Dark One's lands."

The Queen's eyes narrow.

"Bring him to me."

* * *

><p>Robin Hood is in a sorry state when he is brought before the Evil Queen.<p>

She watches with full attention as he hobbles tiredly on bandaged feet and is pushed to his knees by her guards. He's off-balance and falls forwards onto his elbows, hissing as he tries to keep his clumsily-wrapped hands off the floor but not crying out when he clearly fails and jars them. She sees the tense line of his shoulders and thinks him proud. Too proud, for a criminal in ragged clothing so recently a guest in her dungeons. Too proud, for a prince of blood and bruises.

She waits for him to raise his head.

After a pause she looks impatiently to the guards and they force him to, gloves pulling heavily on arms probably bruised and knees digging deep into ribs probably cracked.

His face is thrown upwards as he arches back with a pained exhale. He is bruised, scuffed, puffy with tears, stubble heavy into beard and brow lumpy where a black eye starts to swell, the other eye tensed with pain as he meets her gaze.

He is also striking, and for the first time in a long time the Evil Queen feels something like regret.

* * *

><p>"What were you doing with the Dark One?"<p>

"Nothing."

The Queen rakes her fingernails along crushed fingers in makeshift bandages and grabs his chin with her other hand when he begins to sway.

"What were you doing with the Dark One?"

"I'm a thief, yes? I was stealing."

"Stealing _what_?"

* * *

><p>"You failed."<p>

"On the contrary."

The Evil Queen tilts Robin Hood's head side to side by the chin, idly studying his face in the light.

"Rumplestiltskin let you live?"

"I escaped."

The Queen laughs.

"He let you go. Why?"

"If he did, I didn't know of it. That's not -"

"How did you escape?"

A pause.

"I picked the lock."

Her nails are cat's claws suddenly unsheathed into his jaw.

"You lie."

* * *

><p>Robin resists under torture for the sake of Belle's kindness.<p>

He thinks to faint when she mangles his fingers through the cloth, cannot help but moan when invisible bands constrict his sore and beaten body. He withstands the way she rips apart the hyper-sensitive flesh of his bubbled burns but thinks longingly of Rumplestiltskin's knives when she trails fire from her fingers to create new ones.

He pleads and he cries and speaks useless secrets but cannot think straight through pain and fatigue for a better lie she will believe. He clings to the fantasy that he picked the lock himself, no, he crept out while the Dark One turned his back, no, he pretended he was dead, he took flight on a magic carpet, he does not know how he escaped he just did.

(Alone.)

He's frankly amazed he lasts as long as he does.

"Well," the Queen purrs, "that's easy enough to cure," and rips out his heart.

Some part of him he thinks possibly hysterical finds it funny that it should hurt so much, even after the days he's had, but the Queen holds his heart and almost as soon as he's had the thought he's lost his emotions and his impulse for humour with them.

If he could feel anything he'd be glad he no longer fears pain.

* * *

><p>"How did you escape?"<p>

A pause, then Robin Hood chokes with surprised pain when the Evil Queen squeezes his heart.

"How did you _escape_?"

"I was set free."

"Why?"

"She took pity on me."

The Queen's fist clenches and Robin chokes again.

"_Who_?"

* * *

><p>The outlaw Robin Hood will be executed, of course.<p>

(As thieves' punishment his hands will be removed before death. He will lose his head if the Queen is kind and his entrails if she is not. Fire, maybe, if the Queen feels a personal slight, but a broken neck if she loses control. He is probably too big a prize for the gallows but with such public treason his corpse is sure to be treated to a gibbet.)

The Evil Queen is known for a whimsical temperament, though – law and order are frequently bent to her changing will – and she may yet find alternative use for him.

(He might live, yet.)

* * *

><p>She strokes his heart and watches him shiver with it.<p>

"What is this slave like?"

"Brave, kind, honourable."

"The Dark One treats her well?"

"She is not scared of him. She pulled me from a dungeon coated with my blood but thinks herself safe enough to face the consequences with hope. He must do."

A pause.

"He must do," she echoes, thoughtfully.

* * *

><p>The Mirror finds Belle easily now that he knows she's there to be found.<p>

Rumplestiltskin does well to keep mirrors covered but his unwary captive cleans glass windows and polishes silver and brass, and the Mirror has grown good at rooting out secrets.

When he shows Belle to his Queen Regina smiles and he is captivated.

(She is always most beautiful when she schemes.)

* * *

><p>Robin is dumped in a spartan room away from the dungeons, a healer sent who spares little effort to his comfort and speaks brief unnecessary words to the unlikelihood of recovery and the probability of amputation.<p>

He sleeps, heightened alarm and worry a thing gone with his fear and his heart, only the pure chemical crash of long hours of stress and post-adrenaline high remaining. A single knight watches him but does not otherwise interact, and he seems small enough odds that he would try to escape come morning but for the promise the Queen extracted over his heart.

"I will not escape, I will not try to escape," he repeats as he had repeated her then, feeling it more than his usual oath. It is a compulsion deep within his empty chest, strong with the familiar implacability of magic and the only thing he can think of to care about anymore.

He waits.

* * *

><p>"Mirror, where is Snow White?"<p>

"I don't know, your majesty."

A pause.

"The forest, still, but there is no way to tell whereabouts."

"Has she ever met Robin Hood?"

"Not that I have seen – do you plan to send him after her? Do you think -"

"_Silence_."

* * *

><p>Robin Hood is dragged before the Queen again.<p>

"Have you ever met Snow White?" she asks.

"No."

"Have you killed before?"

"I have."

"Would you bring Snow White to me if I asked you to?'

A pause.

"No."

"And if I made you promise as before?"

Robin Hood's heart pulses red and bright on the table behind the Queen.

"You would compel me."

* * *

><p>Unemotional, Robin returns the Queen's gaze easily while she talks. There is something of a child in the way the Queen stares at him, unusually single-minded fascination, but she is far too predatory to make such a simile stick. He knows he should not let the Queen have Snow White, knows this kingdom cannot prosper with such an unstable usurper on the throne. There is no excuse for feeding her murderous vengeance and no excuse for aiding cold-blooded murder.<p>

But the Queen holds his heart, and he knows now what that means.

(It is difficult not to think of his previous fights in dynastic struggles and he finds it a confusing problem he knows he thinks through wrongly, now. Do the crops really fail because the Evil Queen rules? How many thousands die to keep Snow White safe? His pragmatism is dangerous without emotions to temper him, and what cares a heartless outlaw for a kingdom's benevolent rule? He had not previously thought his morality so dependent on feeling.)

She lays a plan before him and though he speaks dissent he knows he will do as she makes him swear.

He also knows he will fiercely regret it.

* * *

><p>"Can you ride?"<p>

"Not like this."

"Would you ordinarily?"

"Sometimes, on a stolen horse."

A pause.

"Show me your hands."

* * *

><p>Robin does not know what is compulsion and what is his uncaring choice, but he gives his hands without thought to disobeying. He ought to be more wary of her but without fear it doesn't occur to him until he sees his swollen, bandaged clubs dwarf her own slim fingers and has to grit his teeth against the instinct to pull away.<p>

She is brisk and without malice but she pulls the bandages inexpertly and he sinks to his knees unwillingly with it. She spares a glance to his face, expression all derision, and continues, prodding occasionally with finger glowing light purple. He thinks as he counts to ten repeatedly in his head that he almost prefers her torture - anticipation hurts more but it was easier to know his mutilation had her full attention, unsettling to think now she'll barely notice if he faints.

Then she stops, eyes fixed on the skin she has just bared, and he squints up and thinks her peculiar because the mottled lumpy swelling is lower down on the hand itself, the wrist is untouched, pale and whole and even his ink is still intact.

(She seems to pause forever.)

* * *

><p>The Evil Queen's mind is a tempest. It is a joke she does not appreciate.<p>

* * *

><p>The Queen had considered the outlaw's heart for far longer than he had deserved, earlier, thinking of alternative uses for a ruined thief. Were he not so pleasing to her he would already be dead, death of a popular 'hero' good warning to a treacherous populace, but with his heart already in her keeping she had thought him a superior Huntsman who could not repeat his predecessor's mistakes.<p>

Why not send the legendary Robin Hood after the sainted Snow White? Why not, when better healed, gain such a striking bedmate?

(It had felt oddly sobering, to hold the man's heart in her hand, but it's a ridiculous thought so she dismissed it.)

She had thought he was a stroke of good luck, finally, when so little else seemed to go right.

She had not thought he was a test she might fail.

* * *

><p>Once upon a time an unhappy woman ran away from a man with a lion tattoo; he represented a future she was not yet ready for.<p>

(She's still not.)

* * *

><p>"Guards!"<p>

They troop in hastily. "Your majesty?"

"Prepare a stake in the courtyard."

* * *

><p>Burning at the stake is a horrible death: choking on smoke and super-heated air, flames licking inconsistently at flesh that burns in fire and air alike, vital organs protected till the last while the head swims and the heart pounds and the extremities scream with inexorable, escalating pain. Sometimes people last long enough that the pain relents as the nerves are destroyed, but it is a slow, anguished death for which gunpowder is a kindness, and it takes men a long time to die.<p>

In other worlds it is the witches that burn as heretics and it is the heroes that light them.

The Evil Queen does it the other way around.

* * *

><p>"No," Regina says, "use the thinnest shackles."<p>

(She wants to be able to see his wrists.)

* * *

><p>Robin is manhandled to the stake and grimaces when his crushed fingers bash and grate against it, the surprisingly light handcuffs dragging at his wrists as the knights fasten him there. One of them fusses with kindling about his damaged feet and he wonders idly if dying without a heart will make it hurt less, though the sick ache in his cracked ribs now as his back arches unnaturally to the stake make it seem unlikely.<p>

Then the Queen is before him, heart in hand, and he knows he will never find out.

She replaces his heart with a strange tenderness, hand lingering in his chest as his lungs struggle and protest with the shock of it. He looks down in with disembodied shock to see her slim wrist emerging from his flesh, and when he looks up he finds he cannot understand the expression on her face.

The pain of it is almost nothing compared to the way he's swamped with returning emotion, head whirling as heartless memories seek belated emotion too. It's a turmoil of fear and anger and gladness to be himself again only to die so soon and in such a way, he's seen burnings before and it is a cruelty to let him anticipate with fear.

(He cannot understand what has changed his fate.)

The Queen stands too close, still, watching him intently. He recovers something of himself and meets her eyes with anger that feels somehow childish in the circumstances. He cannot free himself with ruined fingers and with knights and Queen looking on, but for all his own crimes and inner failings he does not accept this woman's justice. He knows what it is to embrace a darker instinct and now his life will be stolen for the darkness of someone else's.

She's like a cat, to watch her prey so, and a cruelly beautiful one at that.

* * *

><p>"Any last words, thief?"<p>

He stares at her.

"You'll kill me, though alive I could bring you Snow White, privately though a public execution would make better example, painfully though not half an hour ago I could swear you thought to heal me. It seems to me there is little that I _can_ say. I am no danger to you, on my honour -"

The Queen laughs, surprised and low. "Since when did a thief have honour?"

"Since when did a Queen care about the last words of a common thief?"

Angrily, she reaches up a hand to his chained wrists.

"But you're not _just_ a common thief, are you, Robin?"

"I don't follow."

"You will die," the Queen promises, elated, her breath mixing with his she is so close, "you are in my way."

"I am not -"

She kisses him.

* * *

><p>He cannot breathe.<p>

The Evil Queen kisses him, traps him uncomfortably between his stake and his murderer, and all he can think of is lipstick and pain in his hands and his ribs and his feet. Her lips against his are firm but strangely gentle, closed-mouthed and landed more on his upper lip than lower, her nose pressed into his cheek as he tries to pull back and she surges carefully after him. The hand she had reached up for his wrist wraps around the side of his head and slides down to the corner of jaw and ear, fingers cool and soft against his scalp, loving and caressing and he thinks he should be repulsed.

And yet he finds he kisses her back.

He misses Marian, he does not want to die, and the Evil Queen gives him his first taste of comfort in the long long days she's had him captive so he sinks into it, hatefully grateful. Her lips against his seem right somehow and his brain protests him thinking so stupidly in the hour of his death, thinks his heart misfires, returned to him somehow altered, his ethics clamouring at the wrongness of kissing his murderer and finding the mockery of her kindness pleasing. He lets her kiss him again and again, slow and strangely tentative, and he yearns for more, wild hope springing that maybe she will save him to use him and that he will not die after all. He feels her breathing too quick and shallow against his cheek and he thinks this strangeness is not a thing felt by him alone.

He wonders, bemused, if she plays with all her prisoners thus.

She breaks off and draws back, for an instant eyes wide and expression too open, too soft for such clothes and such crimes and such cruelty, an entirely different person looking back at him from before. Then she is angry again, eyes ablaze with such a curiously personal rage that he thinks he understands that she hates him, more than any, perhaps, except the famous Snow White.

"It is not as a thief that you are dangerous," she snarls, digging the nails of one hand into his wrist where he is tattoo-ed, and dragging his arm against the chain so that he cannot help a low moan as his fingers grind.

He catches the way her lips curl upwards and thinks she seems bitterly glad of it.

(He wishes more than anything he could have seen his child.)

* * *

><p>Decades later Emma Swan will ask the wrong question.<p>

She shouldn't ask whether Mayor Mills loves her son. (She will, with all her blackened heart.)

She should ask whether Mayor Mills is capable of sacrificing him despite it.

* * *

><p>Regina sets fire to her soulmate with magic quite easily, angry at his existence and his effect on her, his kiss still echoing on lips that laugh when the flame catches.<p>

(He is too dangerous – love is weakness and she _would_ love him so, preposterously feels herself being to fall already - he is her soulmate and she will kill him for it.)

Who would she not sacrifice in her quest for Snow White's pain?

His hoarse screams are a terrible thing, though, and she is surprised to find she's still bothered by anything of the sort. She wants to watch his wrists blacken where they're tied above his head, wants this last painful hope for her future provably gone as though he'd never been, the Man with the Lion Tattoo as firmly in the past as the kinder girl he was meant for. The flames are too high though, and as she watches his body desperately twist against the chains she feels that same sinking sobriety begin to leech at her enjoyment. It's a kind of horror she had forgotten, heart sickening and stomach on the floor, and she clenches her fists to stop her hands compulsively lifting and falling as though there is anything left to be done.

(She does not know any magic to reduce pain, would not want to.)

He would have done better to have stayed away.

(It doesn't occur to her until later that she could have simply snapped his neck where he stood and made an end to it. The suppression of that guilt makes her already-hot anger all the wilder.)

She leaves while he still coughs in the smoke; unable to stay, unwilling to stop.

* * *

><p>The Evil Queen redoubles her efforts to wreak vengeance on Snow White.<p>

(Her soulmate will not be the last thing she sacrifices in pursuit of it.)

* * *

><p>Robin of Locksley does not lie in a pauper's grave.<p>

Robin Hood never graces a gibbet.

It's a royal crypt that holds the unmarked bones of the outlaw, the Prince of Thieves.

* * *

><p>When the Evil Queen picks up Belle for the second time and locks her in her tower, she is sure to mention that the risk she took for Robin Hood was in vain. Belle cries angry tears and the Queen is gleeful for it, high on sadistic triumph.<p>

(She begins to despise her soon enough, rankled that Belle should cry so for a stranger when Regina cannot shake the feeling that she's made a terrible mistake.)

She tortures Belle.

(She does not tell her that she tortured Robin first.)

* * *

><p>When the curse calls her to rip out her father's heart Regina hesitates and cries but does it without flinching.<p>

(She threw Hook at her mother and her mother at a mirror, turned her prophesied soulmate to ashes, rewarded the loyalty of her horse with a wasted death; she's had good practise.)

Her happiness looks like Snow White's misery and there is no other way.

More sober for her time in Storybrooke she worries to look at Henry when Miss Swan comes to town. She will always be capable of killing the things she loves most and it has become a habit she fears her son will fall foul of.

And then of course he does, though it was unintentionally done.

* * *

><p>In another universe Regina never came across Robin in her time of madness, and she learnt of Belle another way.<p>

When he says it's all about timing she can feel the truth of it immediately:

She would've killed him back then, had she only had the chance.

* * *

><p>In this universe she fights a flying monkey with Snow alone.<p>

She survives.

* * *

><p>AN: I feel like I should apologise. I do love Regina (and Outlaw Queen! – I hope that came across) and I'm totally behind her redemption, but the first thing I liked about her was that she was scary because she could be so absolutely ruthless even with the things closest to her, so this is an Outlaw Queen take on that, I hope everyone seemed in-character.

(Reviews are awesome, please review! Really curious to know reactions.)


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